un Projects is based on the unceded sovereign land and waters of the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation; we pay our respects to their Elders past and present.
un Projects

Did you know that the world is ending?

by

i wish the earth would j swallow me. Keep on dancing till the world ends. Dreams of the volcanoes in Tāmaki Makaurau violently convulsing. Clasping hands together under the table. Our breath moving in sync. Stripping back the flesh to reveal the whiteness of our bones. Grinding bones into dust. Bone marrow and blood absorbed by the plants. Plants in water asymmetrically climbing and twisting towards the light. The birds going silent. Grazing your skin against the rocks thinking about how soft my skin is and how it is slowly melting off my body. Thinking about the touch. Thinking about the traces u leave behind and how to erase them. Curing my chronic depression through materialism. The perfect feature wall. A metal hat stand on a lean. My grandma’s photo frame that says ‘Love you’ and ‘family forever’. The last protest I went to was in 2009. A police officer bashed me in the face and busted my lip. Dripping with blood. Its okay to not protest. U can always be more supportive to ppl who rly need it.

Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan, also known as Milli Vanilli, accepting a Grammy in 1990. Photo courtesy NARAS

IKEA. Assembling banality to take up space. There are too many things in this world. A sculpture that fails, lacks purpose, disappears back into the world. It never really existed. I’m not even convinced that I really exist. Callum taped a heater to a wall until it fell. I believe it was already broken. Lol. Beautiful ideas should be destructive. Break. Broken. Fall. Smash. Shatter. Spill the tea. The violence of objects. Fragile masculinity makes a big fuck off sculpture. We smashed the walls in with a mallet. The indenture of bodies in the production of too many things. The intangibility of our lives. Stop making. Wind rippling through a room. Art is like that expression about a grain of salt. Young wma selling his brand of clean huge sculptures that lack thought, originality, skill. U take up too much space. Making through wild assemblages that test the limits of what an artwork can mean. How can space be constructed? How can the body be experienced? The privileging of language. Always in relation to the body. Ephemerality. The clunkiness of permanence. The nausea of very formulaic ‘performance’ that’s either pointless or ‘insert 1970s performance art trope here’ or so theatrical it makes me blush.

It’s tired. I’m tired.

It’s 4.28am. Every public art institution is destroying its collections. Burn baby burn. Disco inferno. Sacking all of the curators who have had positions for longer than two years j to really mix it up. The ‘firemen’ in Fahrenheit 451 burning books for the benefit of a futuristic utopian society where education has no value. Returning to communism in 2076. Max writing about a businesswoman in Ponsonby lint rolling herself before a meeting as a performance. Performing self-management rituals. Kim Gordon dancing in the Ciccone Youth video for Addicted to love. Astrological mind map of every artist u know. Know yourself & love urself.

My heart is so broken I need to 3D print a new one. Harvesting organs in 2046. Listening to Black Tambourine with u and touching ur hand to reassure u we will not die. Keep on dancing till the world ends. What purpose does art have? Objects without a purpose. What if u made work that just didn’t exist, that was intended to disappear or like u just show up to ur opening and thats the work. Network #workbitch. The invisibility of emotional labour as performance. Ornamental severity. Swiping right until you win a cash prize to offset the cost of ur aesthetic labour.

Kris Jenner promoting Rejuvicare. Image courtesy Getty Images and Rejuvicare

U get vaseline and U get vaseline and U get vaseline.

Apolitical indie rock during Bush-era America really meant nothing to anyone but Zach Braff and the guy who coined the misogynistic af term ‘manic pixie dream girl’. White male academic from Texas tells a predominantly pākehā audience that ‘we’re all islanders’. Rhizomatic methodologies. Asthma attacks walking from point A to point B. Dying America. The disease of racism. Having empathy. The vastness of the ocean. Escaping into the cracks of the ocean’s floor. All of the ships and aircrafts that disappeared somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. Patting a shark. The ice caps melting by 2045. The great barrier reef dying. The water became too warm and the algae vomited itself out of the coral, bleaching it and disrupting the life cycle of the entire reef and everything that feeds off the algae. Destroying all of the ecosystems. Becoming an underwater civilisation by 2130. Disintegrating within the deep web. Wearing camo. Clothes as armour. U can’t see me coz im wearing camo head to toe.

Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out.1

Keep on dancing till the world ends. Nasty orangey fake tan. A mass murderer war criminal versus a racist rapist endorsed by the KKK. Kris Jenner selling the Kardashian Kollection on the shopping network in 2009. Families starving. Without. Ten people living in one two-bedroom house. A family of five living in their car. Helplessness. Kim Kardashian ASMR. Hunger being eradicated between 2025–2028. Brains spill out like spaghetti. Mom’s spaghetti.

Mya’s tinder profile as of 27th June 2017

The weight of privilege and what to do with it. Community art as a colonising and ultimately gentrifying practice. Concrete dust filling my lungs and hardening. Being a citizen of Vape Nation. A global Google citizen. Imagining stack data collapsing. The failure of making. The failure of art. Failing. Flailing. I’m afraid to make anything truth be told. I just want to make videos for Instagram and pretend that my content isn’t being taken and analysed by a corporation in order to establish me as a marketable brand by using my data to streamline the kinds of content I might be interested in consuming. Nothing is free.

Its all good baby baby.

Wanting u to hit me in the face so i know its real and not an episode of Black Mirror. Weapon video systems capturing missiles exploding into children and other innocent bodies. Hunting an enemy that was fed off the corporate greed that dictates the governance of America and the western world. Detention centres dedicated to the subjugation of ‘illegal aliens’. Apolitical art. Everything wearing you down. An energy emerges from the womb of Papatūānuku towards Ranginui. When my friend said they thought the lights flashing during the earthquake were aliens I completely agreed. It wasn’t electrical currents. It was the aliens emerging from Papatūānuku’s womb coming to save us.

Everyone in New Zealand is popping off about Donald Trump and Brexit but haven’t bothered to consider what is happening in Australia or New Zealand. Pauline Pantsdown. Pauline Hanson terrified me as an eight-year-old growing up in a backwater town in central Queensland where her rhetoric was celebrated. I was afraid because I looked different. I didn’t look like I was on Home and Away. Would I be targeted? Our Prime minister in Aotearoa stating that, ‘We lead a government that is delivering for all New Zealanders’. Rising homelessness. The impossibility of ever buying a house unless you give up avocados. The incarceration rate rising and targeting Māori. The opposition is basically the same as our current government. Some balding white guy. Even the most progressive parties are making jokes about killing immigrants. Xenophobia. Unless you’re tangata whenua you have no claim to this land. The rising fascism cracking apart the systems of apparent ‘togetherness’ white supremacy wanted us to believe existed. We just aren’t. Keep calm and carry on. Why are they so afraid?

I don’t let anything get to me though.
I just did some pilates and a face mask.
 #easybreezycovergirl #eatpraylove #livelaughlove

The constant flux of existence. The myth of technology turning on humanity. In 1999 my Dad was so scared about Y2K that he bought forty tins of baked beans, dozens of bottles of water and emergency blankets. He desperately wanted us to stay together ‘just in case’. My mother laughed at him and we went to a friend’s house for a party anyway. My dad couldn’t relax and at one point held me. This giant Māori man who claimed to be scared of nothing was desperately uneasy and utterly convinced that the world would end and take his whole family. In 2012 he begged me to move home because the end of the world was coming and he wanted us to be together again ‘just in case’. In 2016 he offered to pay for me to move home because there were too many Earthquakes in Wellington and a tsunami might kill me. After the 2016 earthquake in Kaikoura groups of tourists ate the crayfish at the marae because the freezers broke. Plate after plate. Now that’s manākitanga.

Here it comes another year
Come on everyone, new millennium
Here it comes another year
Everyone, new millennium2

I heard Dido’s White Flag in the supermarket while drinking an iced coffee and cried. Everything is so broken and I feel so ashamed. Watching my flowers die and thinking it was more satisfying than fucking. Who can fuck anyone when everything is so chronically depressing? Keep dancing till the world ends. Wondering who puts orchids on my great-great-grandmother’s grave still. Prejudice I don’t experience. Struggling to enact ways of resistance. The fraught nature of identity and space. Of course I’m a performer. I’ve never stopped performing. Performing or serving? Are you being served? The emotional labour of being alive. Drinking gin naked in my bed under the covers concerned my roof might collapse, but also waiting for the locusts and the sky to turn dark and the sea to swell red with blood. Capitalist robot slave. Why would anyone in Australia or New Zealand believe that our governments would actually try and fundamentally change anything within our current system of governance? The trees grew emotions and died. Gabriel saying that the horns on the ram in Daniel’s vision were kings of Media and Persia. Maybe we should burn. Lightness and heaviness. The goal of destabilising power structures. The end of the world in 3797. The fake band (as performance art) Milli Vanilli accepting a grammy for the song ‘Blame it on the rain’.

Fresh and Fruity is a digital indigenous collective based in Aotearoa. Founded in Ōtepoti as a physical space in 2014 it now exists entirely online and is run by Hana Pera Aoake and Mya Morrison-Middleton. Fresh and Fruity’s work has been shown and published across Aotearoa, as well as in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. The text has been used as the catalyst for a dynamic project, also titled Till the word ends, between a wide group of artists across Aotearoa and Australia.

1. Excerpt from ‘The Glass Essay’ in Glass, Irony and God, Anne Carson, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995.
2. Will Smith in his song ‘Will 2K’, 1999.